If you’re a cat lover and love capturing their unique fur patterns and colors, you may have struggled to capture sharp and clear images. In this post, I will show you some tips and tricks to help you improve your cat photography skills and capture stunning images of sharper cat fur so your cat photos look stunning.

I have been trying to improve my fur photograph quality by taking a sharper cat picture for a while now and I am learning that just getting out into the garden, a park or a city street and practising gives you confidence and helps you learn.
Using your camera helps you remember settings for modes like Aperture Priority*, and Shutter Priority**. If you take your settings one at a time and do what I did here – push each one as far as you can. You will learn what each mode and setting can do, as well as what doesn’t work. which is just as important.
Let‘ s Take a Look at My Fur Settings
As your skills grow, you will want to keep improving for your own satisfaction and personal growth as a photographer, even if you consider yourself an amateur, not a professional.
When you work to take a sharper cat photo and get sharp fur much more often

It has taken me time to work up confidence and find settings that are starting to work and I want to share them for you. Especially if you aspire to good sharp fur on your pets.
Taking A Sharper Cat Photo
Remember, you lose nothing by experimenting, and you can delete pictures that don’t work. This is the big advantage of a modern digital-based SLR. Download the pictures – delete your disasters after you have taken a good look and learned what worked and what did not.
For these pictures I pushed everything further than I had before.I experimented with close-ups of Dot Kitten our tabby cat to see what would happen.
Cat close-ups are becoming a favourite subject of mine and exploring new areas with a favourite shooting concept means it doesn’t seem horribly unfriendly. [I posted about the amazing effects you can get with cat photo closeups here.]
Dot was in a relaxed mood and I got down to cat level so she was not edgy about the camera. I began to explore the shutter speed and the F-stop with a few adjustments to the light through the ISO button. These may not be standard photography settings but they allowed me to discover how sharp I can get.
Here is what I ended up with:
- ISO 3200
- F-stop at F22
- Shutter speed 1/400
When you explore, never be afraid to make mistakes it is going to happen. You never know what your pictures may teach you!
Useful Photography Definitions
- Aperture Priority* Wikipedia “Aperture priority, often abbreviated A or Av (for aperture value) on a camera mode dial, is a setting on some cameras that allows the user to set a specific aperture value (f-number) while the camera selects a shutter speed to match it that will result in proper exposure”
- Shutter Priority** Wikipedia. “Shutter priority (usually denoted as S on the mode dial), also called time value (abbreviated as Tv), refers to a setting on some cameras that allows the user to choose a specific shutter speed while the camera adjusts the aperture to ensure correct exposure.”
- Definition of F5.6 “Aperture refers to the lens diaphragm. In ‘auto’ mode it is similar to the human eye and narrows when there is a lot of light or widens when there is little light. Aperture is measured in f-stops (for example, f1.4, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22 and so on).” Australian Geographic
Thanks so much for these tips. Now that we have our new camera we are having a great time playing with it. We should have gotten this years ago but were worried about poor battery life. That is a thing of the past
Purrs
This is good to know Timmy. There is so much fun you can have with your camera. Enjoy!
I’m determined I’m going to learn how to use my Nikon camera so I can get better photos of the girls!
Very clear photos! One of these days I’ll go back to using an SLR (it’s been many decades). Now I just use my cell phone and don’t have many options. I always enjoy reading about how to take better photos from you.
My beef with photos is usually that too much detail makes it in. More often than not I end up softening almost all of them.
Dot is so cute. Your fur-tography is great. I am learning a lot from your tips even though I’m still pretty rubbish at it. I wanted to get great shot at Plush’s visit to the World Show but I didn’t really get anything good I just kind of ran around and snapped lol.
Thanks for the blog hop as always. I learned some things yesterday at the Instagram workshop about photography and one thing that stood out and where I am making mistakes is I need to get a portable LED light which will make all the difference so slowly am getting their BUT your tips are always encouraging and your photography amazing
There are some excellent lights on Amazon for a modest price!
Dot is so cute! I love pictures where you can really see their whiskers and fur. I luck out and get good photos of my boys once in awhile haha. I’ll have to play around with my camera settings more to see if I can get better at taking closeups.
Dot is beautiful! Thank you for the tips, as always!
I love fur and whisker photography. Great lesson and I signed my name for Alley Cats.
Exquisitely clear and I can see all the furs:)
Dot is so pretty!
Love all of those and your tips are always the best!
Beautiful photos!
Sharpness is one of my issues. And I haven’t figured out how to use the photo editor to make it better!
Great photos of Dot. She is a beauty. XO